#trending

New census data released showed that even affluent Blacks and Hispanics making more than $75,000 per year live in poorer neighborhood than their average lower-income White counterparts who earn just $40,000 per year.

The news supports what many have witnessed for years: segregation is still very much apart of our lives.

“Separate translates to unequal even for the most successful black and Hispanic minorities,” says sociologist John Logan, director of US2010 Project at Brown University, which studies trends in American society.

“Blacks are segregated and even affluent blacks are pretty segregated,” says Logan, who analyzed 2005-09 data for the nation’s 384 metropolitan areas. “African Americans who really succeeded live in neighborhoods where people around them have not succeeded to the same extent.”

The disparities are strongest in large metro areas in the Northeast and Midwest where segregation has always been high. It’s lowest in more recent booming parts of the Sun Belt.

“White middle-class families have the option to live in a community that matches their own credentials,” Logan says. “If you’re African American and want to live with people like you in social class, you have to live in a community where you are in the minority.”

Washington D.C. and Atlanta are the only two metro areas that buck the trend, but the data is depressing.

Because neighborhood poverty levels are linked to lower quality schools and lessened health care options, even wealthier minorities are shut out of many of the services that their White counterparts access easily.

“Even though they have income comparable to whites, they don’t have access to schools or other neighborhood amenities that would be comparable to those available to white families,” says Howard University sociologist Roderick Harrison. “Some better-off black and Hispanic families are nevertheless living with the same problems poor blacks and Hispanics are living with.”

Even in 2011, when we have a Black president, and minorities have made gains across the board we are still shut out of many of the neighborhoods and the opportunities that our White counterparts enjoy.